sourdough

How to Make Excellent Sour Dough Bread

First you need a quality starter. As Alton Brown says a starter is the pet you feed every day and eat too. To make your own is very simple. You will want to find a smallish container (I use a wide mouth pint jar) some "breathable" fabric (I use cheese cloth/muslin) and then use the ring for the pint jar.

Then you will want to use fresh ground whole wheat flour or rye flour, you can use store bought but I have found that using the fresh ground stuff works the best. To the flour add water. I just use tap, but where we live we have a well, so you might want to use filtered water from the store. It is easiest to start your starter in either the morning or evening because for the first week or so you are going to be playing with it morning and night

Here is your schedule;

 

day one 3 tbs flour - 5 tbs water morning 1 tbs flour - 2 tbs water evening

day two 1tbs flour - 5 tbs water morning 1 tbs flour 2 tbs water evening

day three take out 3 tbs starter - throw away add 3 tbs flour - 5 tbs water morning 1 tbs flour - 2 tbs water evening

 

Keep repeating the above cycle until your mixture gets a distinct sour smell - you will know when it smells correct. Once your starter is smelling correct then you can start to use regular white flour to feed it. There is natural yeast in the fresh ground whole wheat that makes the sour dough starter work fast.

You can leave the starter on your kitchen counter. It will bubble and it may seperate. This is all good. Just be sure to stir your mixture when you feed it.

Once you get the starter going - after about a week you can start using it to make bread. If you are going to make bread every day or every other day, you can just leave your starter on the counter. You will be using it and feeding it often. Once you take your starter out to make bread add another couple tablespoons of flour and some water back to your starter. If you need more starter than add flour and water morning and evening. If you need to slow down your starter you can put it in the fridge. You can also take a 1/4 cup of your really awesome starter and freeze it, just in case something happens to the starter you are working with.

To make bread - start the night before

Put about 1/4 cup of your starter in a big mixing bowl and add three cups of flour, white works best for this. Add enough water to make a sticky mess of the flour. Mix it with a spoon for a minute or so. It should be too sticky to kneed by hand, but not soupy. Cover with a towel and put in a draft free spot. (I use my oven). Let it rest over night. In the morning (I usually wait till quite late in the day to do this) mix the dough again. Mix just enough to get it off the sides of the bowl, while putting flour down the sides of the bowl to keep the dough from re sticking. Let it rest until you are ready to bake it.

You will need a dutch oven or cast iron stew pot with lid. Place them in your oven and then turn the oven up to 450. Let the oven and pot get really hot. Ploop the dough into the pot and put on the lid. Cook for 40 minutes covered and then another 10 or so with out the lid. Dump the finished bread onto a rack to cool. Enjoy.

Some tips I have found

1. The longer you let the dough sit the better the crumb turns out. If you can start your bread one day and then bake it the next you will get lots of big and little hbles.
2. Leaving the lid on longer during cooking produces a harder crust.
3. You can sprinkle seeds on top of the dough before cooking for yummy variation.
4. You can put small bits of cheese in your bread during the initial mixing stage for way yummy bread.
5. You can roast garlic bulbs then mix the roasted garlic cloves into the bread dough at the initial mixing stage.
6. You can use 1 cup of whole wheat flour instead of white for a more healthful variation.
7. You can add a 1/2 tsp salt to help your bread keep a little longer (though mine doesn't last that long around here)

If you don't have a cast iron pot you can use a pizza stone and water thrown into the oven to make steam. You will need to add enough extra flour to make the dough kneadable. Then before you put it on your pizza stone cut some slash marks in it. Make the marks deep (almost all the way through the dough). Put the dough in the oven wait a minute then throw a cup of water under the pizza stone or you can spray your oven with a spray bottle full of water. The object is to get the water in fast & keep the temperature up. Your bread should be done in about 35-40 minutes.